Swordcrossed

by Freya Marske

Being himself was a failed experiment. Luca had learned that lesson already.

Luca looked at Matti, something uncertain and wild swirling in his stomach, and experienced the vastly strange sensation of not wanting to lie. Nor did he want to peel back the paper of himself and reveal something true. Both contrary impulses seemed to stem from the swirling, like twin trunks grown up from the same seed.

“Jay. Your family makes wool?” “Sheep make wool,” said Matti, deadpan. “But yes. My family takes it from there.”

Matti didn’t know swords, but he knew how to hold a bluff until it wasn’t a bluff any longer. He was not going to budge, and he wanted to see if the shifting currents of Luca would part around him.

But was this an opportunity to behave himself, or an opportunity for action? You want to believe the latter, a voice in him whispered. You want something to give to Matti Jay. You want him to owe you something, or at least for you to owe him less. Another voice, softer and more thrilling, added: You want to lay a gift at his feet. You want to see if he will smile at you.

How long had it been since someone had touched him with real purpose? An empty eternity, sang Matti’s body. His breath felt very loud.

Matti had to concentrate to inhale fully, as though an action that had been easy and unthinking for every moment of his life until this one had suddenly become a matter that required as much effort as a new parry.

He’d nearly made a fool of himself in more than one meeting, thoughts whirling in skittish circles around the prospect of being in a room with Luca with, as Luca had said, no swords between them. Nothing good ever came of wanting anything this badly, but gods, Matti was on fire with the thought of it anyway.

Matti was so likeable. You could cut him in half like fresh bread and he’d be warm all the way through.

Luca’s throat crowded with possibilities, with thirst, and with an unexpected willingness to maintain the rhythm of their conversation. He still wanted to bury his fingers in Matti’s hair, to turn his careful steps into a dance with a clear destination. But growing alongside that was the urge to crack himself open and whisper something true into the air between them. He wanted to draw all of Matti’s secrets out and turn them in his hands; he wanted to show Matti his own.

Matti felt he was on a downhill slope of some kind. He was fighting the incline the whole way, but the ground was smooth and treacherous beneath his feet, like frost on long grass.

Your name has echoed through my mind / And I just think you should, think you should know / That nothing safe is worth the drive / And I would follow you, follow you home

Matti had been looking down at his feet. When Luca spoke, he lifted his head, and the smile that broke over his face was like the moment when a lock surrendered to Luca’s picks. Something gave way before it. Some small piece of machinery fell in Luca’s chest with an audible click, some unseen hinges opened, and a soft unfamiliar happiness flowed through the crack.

“I’d hate to think I was shoving more things into the tangle that goes on up there.” He meant to poke at Matti’s forehead, but somehow the gesture gentled itself. Luca found himself with his fingertips soft at Matti’s temple, his hand barely hovering above the side of Matti’s face. Matti leaned into it. After a moment his eyes fell closed: not a flutter, a definitive fall, just as he’d fallen to sit down on that bench when they’d left the Vane house. It had the same exhausted air to it. Matti’s cheek was wet. Luca’s throat felt tight. “You are. You do,” Matti said, very soft. “You tangle me up.”

Matti gave a sudden sunburst of a smile and touched Luca’s mouth. He did it absently, as though his hand was acting freely from the rest of him: a touch like an exploration of new cloth’s texture, like a finger between pages, marking the place in a book. Luca’s whole body tried to sway into the smallness of it. He would have paid every bronze he’d ever earned, every gold in the coffers of his House, to hear Matti say be quiet, or be still, and to keep on looking at Luca like this while he waited for Luca to comply.

Everything that they’d done together before now had been a secret of one kind or another. There was something unsettlingly blatant about this, walking as friends walked. A wary shock like new skin exposed to the light. Luca half expected to feel the drag of gazes following their progress. It felt remarkable. People should be remarking.

For an incoherent heartbeat Matti had wanted to take it back and tie it for Luca, let his hands linger on the column of Luca’s throat—wanted to kiss Luca in front of his family and everyone he knew. It was a thought as impossible as the rest of the things that Matti wanted.

“Luca Piere,” said Luca to the group at large. “At your service. Well, at the groom’s service, obviously.”

Almost visibly, Matti’s thoughts were looping him back again and again, like circling dancers.

Everything crumbled. Luca didn’t care. He was done pretending he did. He would have tried, for Matti’s sake, but Matti was clinging to him and Matti deserved more than his own stupid immolation. Matti should know what it was like to have exactly what he wanted, even if it was just for one evening.

“I lied about my name. You’ve been lying to everyone for years. You’re just too hypocritical to face the fact that your family is running a con greater than anything I ever pulled in my short, stupid career. The Jays are good at seeming.”

How did you solve the slow surrender of yourself to another person, like a dwindling stack of coins at a card table, only to look up from your empty hands to see the cold triumph of your opponent?

The entire foundation of Luca and Matti’s relationship—whatever it was—had been built on shifting, treacherous sand.

This slope is treacherous /And I, I, I like it

Matti knew how to do this too. He’d learned it far more thoroughly than he’d learned how to handle a sword: How to smile without meaning it. How to project calm control, when all he wanted was to throw plates to the ground and shout. The art of seeming.

The fierce shard of hope in him refused to be talked to, refused to be smothered. He missed Luca with all the hunger that he hadn’t felt for the food.

this wasn’t going to be one of his meaningless cons. He couldn’t slither away at the first sign of consequences, or cheerfully siphon off what he wanted with one hand while making amends with the other. He was buying a future with a future. As bargains went it was practically mythic, and nobody escaped intact from myth. The gods made sure you paid in the end.

Of the two of them, Luca was the con artist. And yet Luca knew he’d been right: Matti was just as much a liar, even if the shape of it hung differently on him. Matti was the one to whom honesty, real honesty, truths scraped right out of the chambers of the heart, came the least easily.

Matti kissed the side of that mouth as though to sip at its secrets, its unsaid declarations.

Luca felt like a route being memorised; an artwork being considered one last time by its creator before it was sent for framing. It made him want to make huge, impossible, unwise promises.

Luca had always wanted to be liked, to know that people desired him, or simply enjoyed his company. But all of that faded next to how it felt to be accepted for who he truly was, stripped of stories. Luca Harte with all his dramatics and all his many failings. He’d never felt so wanted. He’d never wanted to keep anything, to devote himself to anything, with the violence that he felt it now.

Matti felt a warm knot in his throat. The Jays might be starting to learn, with tentative steps, how to haul their truths out into the open.